The RetroWorld Expo is always a high point for my convention-going year. Especially since, this year, we weren’t able to go to ConnectiCon. Not because we were busy that weekend; we weren’t. Not because we didn’t have tickets, because we did. We couldn’t get in because the line to get in was hours long. Was San Diego ComicCon-hours long. After waiting in line an hour and with another couple of hours perhaps before we could get in, we dipped out.
Tickets not used for this year can be carried over for the next. Next time, we’re registering in advance and skipping the line.
So: the Polaroid Go 3 instant camera.
I still have all the pictures I used to take back when cameras used film. I have a lot of the pictures I’ve taken since the world went digital, but not all of them. Most of them are backed up in Google Photos. I used to occasionally take the best of those and have them printed into physical photo albums, but I haven’t done that in some time.
Nintendo sent me a marketing e-mail for a Pokemon-themed instant camera. I thought that might be a fun gift for my twin grandkids, but they were (of course) entirely sold out of them. But I was intrigued by the idea of having physical photos again. So, I bought one of their non-themed cameras for myself.
It’s weird. My mom bought me a Kodak instant camera when I was a kid. I took pictures that year all over New England when visiting relatives and stuff. And in fact the pictures I took then are some of the only pictures I have of my mom, who died relatively young of lung cancer.
Physicality seemed really attractive.
The Polaroid Go 3 is not my old Kodak instant camera, and it’s not the old Polaroid either. The camera is small, and the pictures are small, about half the size of the old Polaroid/Kodak instant pictures. The pictures themselves are dark, a little muddy, a little blurry. But they’re real, they can be touched, and it’s just so retro, and I like retro. Getting good shots from the camera is going to take some work — bright light, or close so the flash can do its thing, not a lot of things going on. But I like the process. I can always take real photos with my phone. Taking an instant photo feels a little more creative.
I definitely did take actual photos, like the one above, for probably the most questionable item I saw at the show…
For $20, it was almost cheap enough to save the world from it. But I didn’t.
So for Vectrex, there wasn’t as much there as usual. I did see the Blitz! American football game for a super reasonable price, $15. I might have gone back to buy it except we had to leave early for a family issue. There was a Vectrex bundle for sale with a stack of mint games, including one I did not already have, Star Hawk. The sellers were unwilling to break up the bundle. Hence, I did not leave with any new (to me) Vectrex games.
We did get a few games. Kasul got Wizardry VI for the SNES and Yet Another Mahjongg game. I got Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows. Some say they should have stuck with six without shoe-horning in a seventh, but it is what it is. It’s a follow-up to another Gauntlet game I recently obtained, Dark Legacy. They are both 3D slayfests. I also got the original Populous for the Super Nintendo. This was the only version I played back in the day, renting it from Blockbuster a couple of times. I never did really well on it; it’s payback time. Playback time. Whatever.
Day was cut short, so didn’t really get a chance to look at everything. The floor seemed smaller than last year, and if there was a free play arcade set up anywhere, I missed it.
There were more games I wanted, but they were well above the PriceCharting price. I’ll pay a small premium, but not double the value. That’s just gouging.
